Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 reflects on how the most recent stage of globalization has transformed the social topography of northern Mexico while generating the morbid symptoms that frequently accompany the demise of a prevailing order. The novel invites us to think this transformation as interregnum, or as a hiatus that ensues following the demise of the sovereign. But what exactly is it that has died as far as Bolaño is concerned? I propose that it is not just the national state and its role in containing and regulating the contradictions generated by capitalism but also literature itself, or at least a certain understanding of literature that has fallen. And what then would be left of literature, if literature has not simply gone away? One possible answer can be found in the relation that the novel takes up with the question of evil.

Sponsored by the Department of Romance Langauges and Literatures, the Institute for the Humanities, the International Institute, and Rackham Graduate School